OCTOBER 23, 2013

No such thing as 'free' health care, President Obama

FAIRFAX, Va. – Americans for Limited Government President Nathan Mehrens issued the following statement in response to President Barack Obama's Rose Garden declaration that preventive care under the health care law will be "free":

"President Obama's laundry list of 'free' health care that is provided is either a willful disregard for the truth or an unfortunate display of his own knowledge about the cost of providing services. No medical service is free. Doctors, laboratories, and other health care professionals must be paid and those payments will be made either by the taxpayers or through the higher cost of premiums that are being forced on consumers. It is sad that Obama continues to cling to his outmoded belief that you can get something for nothing if he just says it is so.

"The hard facts of Obamacare are that it will turn full time employees into a nation of part-time workers, force millions of Americans off their employer-provided plans, drive up health premiums, and break the budget with tens of millions of people being added to the rolls of government-run, taxpayer-funded health insurance.

"Obama kept on calling his health care law a 'good product.' If the product is so good then why force everyone to buy it? The fact is the entire push for 'universal' health care in the U.S. is simply unbridled government coercion to force individuals to behave in a certain way. If they ever get their website working, and millions who qualify still do not sign up for a product they never asked for, we should expect they will at some point simply be auto-enrolled by an over-zealous bureaucracy convinced that it just knows better than the rest of us."